3. Six days shall tasks be done. It is somewhat surprising, as commentaries from the Middle Ages onward have reflected, that after announcing a calendar of the sundry annual festivals (moʿadim, “fixed times”), the text proceeds to spell out the weekly obligation of the sabbath day. Rashi tries to reconcile the contradiction by proposing that the mention of the sabbath is to indicate that violation of the sabbath and violation of the festivals are equivalent in seriousness; but the consensus of modern scholarship is that these verses on the sabbath were added, perhaps out of later historical considerations, such as the impossibility of observing the pilgrim festivals in the Babylonian exile. This addition would have been facilitated by a certain ambiguity in the word shabbat (literally, “cessation”), which can apply, as it does elsewhere in this chapter, not only to the weekly day of rest but to a festival, when most everyday tasks are also prohibited.

an absolute sabbath. The Hebrew uses a doubled construct form that generally indicates a superlative, shabbat shabbaton.

4. sacred convocations which you shall call. In this recurring phrase, the verb, tiqreʾu, and its object, miqraʾey qodesh, are cognates, something that the translation intimates at least etymologically because “convocation” is derived from a Latin term for calling. “Call” in this context obviously means to “proclaim,” “convene,” “invite.”

5. the first month. As elsewhere, the calendar begins with the spring month that Exodus calls Abib and that will later be called Nissan. The present list does not use names for the month, simply referring to them by ordinal numbers.

6. a Festival. The Hebrew ḥag is a term reserved in biblical usage for pilgrim festivals (evidently derived from a verb that means to “circle round” or “wend one’s way”), when the population of the countryside was enjoined to come to the sanctuary.

10. sheaf. The early rabbis understood the term ʿomer not as a reference to a bundle of grain (in this case of a late spring harvest, probably barley) but as a unit of dry measure.

11. from the morrow of the sabbath. This innocent-looking phrase is fraught with ambiguity that generated historical schism. The early rabbis understood “sabbath” to refer to the first day of the Passover celebration (see the comment on verse 3), and this has been the normative system in Judaism ever since for counting forward to the Festival of Weeks, Shavuoth. The Karaites, among others, understood shabbat here as a reference to the sabbath day, although the question was raised whether this applied to the sabbath occurring in the week of the Passover festival or to the first sabbath after that week. (As a rule, issues of calendar were often defining for schismatic divisions in Judaism.) Whatever the reasons of the rabbis, their construction of shabbat as referring to “festival” seems implausible. Baruch Levine and Jacob Milgrom have variously understood shabbat to mean “week” in the present context. In verse 16, the phrase “seventh sabbath” in fact seems to mean “seventh week.”

20. They shall be holy for the LORD, for the priest. The second phrase, which syntactically is in apposition with the first, is a kind of gloss on it: in the case of this offering of first fruits, the consecrated status of the foodstuffs (“holy for the LORD”) means not that they are to be consumed in fire on the altar but that they are reserved exclusively for the use of the priests.

21. a sacred convocation—it will be for you. The oddness of the syntax might conceivably reflect a scribal insertion here of a formula reiterated elsewhere. In independent clauses, we find the complete syntactic unit, “A sacred convocation it will be for you.” Here, however, “a sacred convocation” is already the object of the verb “you will call,” and so “it will be for you” seems not to belong.

24. a commemoration with horn blast. Although the instrument used is not specified here, the reasonable assumption is that it is the ram’s horn, or shofar. The “commemoration” in question is the act of making God remember, or take note of, Israel through the ritual of horn blasts. Some biblical scholars have detected a hint of an annual ceremony for the coronation of God, but the historical evidence for that vivid conjecture is scant.

27. Yet. The Hebrew ʾakh (“yet,” “however”) expresses opposition but also a focusing emphasis (“only”).

you shall afflict yourselves. In legal-cultic contexts, this idiom refers primarily to fasting, a meaning perhaps reinforced by the fact that the noun in question, the ubiquitous nefesh, can also mean both “throat” and “appetite,” though its most plausible sense in context is simply as an intensive form of the pronoun.

32. from evening to evening. Only here is this phrase attached to the observance of a sacred day. Levine’s reasonable inference is that the system of counting the day from sunset to sunset, standard in later Judaism, may not yet have been normative in the biblical period, and hence its binding application to the Day of Atonement had to be stipulated.

you shall keep your sabbath. More literally, “you shall cease your cessation.”

36. solemn gathering. This is a single word in the Hebrew, ʿatseret (elsewhere, also ʿatsarah), which appears to refer specifically to the cultic assembly at the end of the festival, perhaps because the verb from which it derives means “to retain” or “to hold back.”

40. a stately tree. In modern Hebrew, ʿets hadar has come to mean “citrus tree,” but that is only because in the late Second Temple period this whole phrase was understood to refer to the citron, the somewhat larger and brighter-yellow cousin of the lemon. Hadar, however, is a general term referring to majesty, stateliness, or splendor, and it is probable that the original instruction was to take the fruit of any grand-looking tree, not necessarily the fruit of a specific genus of trees.

you shall rejoice before the LORD your God. The injunction to rejoice occurs only in the case of Succoth, the fall Festival of Huts. One reason for this may be that this was the final harvest festival of the agricultural cycle, and hence the pilgrims, free from the need to hurry back to their farms to look after the next crop, could spend the full week in celebration at the sanctuary where sacrifices were offered and attendant feasts enjoyed. In the climate of the Land of Israel, this was the time (late September to early October) when the long hot dry season came to an end and the welcome autumnal rains were imminent. In precisely this connection, we know from the Mishnah that the Succoth celebration in the Second Temple included an elaborate ritual for invoking water for the land (simḥat beyt hashoʾevah), a ritual explicitly represented as a peak of collective joy.

43. I made the Israelites dwell in huts. Huts were used for temporary shelter by farmers watching over their crops about to be harvested and so may have been associated with this festival of the fall harvest. Milgrom suggests that the flood of pilgrims to the central sanctuary in this most popular of the pilgrim festivals compelled many of them to spend the week in huts or other temporary shelters because the town itself could not have possibly provided the bulk of them with lodging. Whether the original explanation was in agricultural practice or in the material necessities of pilgrimage, a historical-theological rationale is now provided.

44. Moses spoke the fixed times. Here “spoke” has the obvious sense of “enjoined,” “proclaimed,” “enunciated.”